Yesterday…

Dear Mariah and Sarah,

I’m lying here feeling pretty horrible and am remembering so many memories of people judging me for being sick, or weak, or disoriented, or disorganized, or simply not understanding a single thing I am asking for or needing, never so much as asking if I am okay, and… if one had met me before I had come back from Mexico they would be sooo much less likely to judge me, my voice and body movements too, my eating and sleeping habits, and I am feeling how unfair it is once again to be in a horrible general life environment that is taking everything out of me so that if I were to reach out for some kind of support, now, as opposed to, say, in October, I am sooo more likely to get the ‘cow seller’ type of response or to hear condescension or ‘it looks like you don’t know how to take care of yourself’ in people’s tones and gazes precisely when I need that most: suddenly I need help so much more than I did a couple months ago but I feel less likely than ever to find soneone who might hear me.

Because I have been abused again and got sucked back in to a bad situation that has so quickly transformed me to feeling or looking like I am at the point of death, it is not my fault but people I reach out to are less likely to see me as capable just based on that and it is absolutely exhausting to be constantly invalidated. Not only that, I cannot imagine calling anyone after what happened to me in Glendale and trying to explain that a psych unit (that I was only in because I needed water and an officer suggested this as a *solution* to distress not quite telling me that it was perhaps the very wellspring if hell). I surrendered myself to the fact that I was probably going to die in that hospital and some staff actually wanted to make me think that I was dying which is horrible… but will I ever find anyone to believe me or is the inevitable result if being so invalidated to be invalidated more? I put Sarah as my number 1 contact at the hospital and I have no idea if anyone tried to reach out to her. I doubt it because I only left names and no numbers.

Anyway, though, do you get how hard it is to believe that anybody out there at all will validate my stories of oppression and abuse over the last few weeks? Who would even believe these kinds of stories? I feel like if Sarah thought I needed a cow seller then certainly she does now and it is not fair because it is because of things that have been done *to* me, but… the plot against me was perhsps intentionally such that if I spoke out I would look absurd and insane. Only with the skills I have in writing and expression and conceptualising )and the fact that I write a *lot* of words) have I maybe, just maybe, been able to defend my ‘sanity (i.e. right to have my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions respected and validated) to someone who might take the time to read through this diary and truly listen and perhaps get some context on my life.

It is really hard to feel like everything has been taken out of me again and along woth everything else the life energy I need to defend that I know how to take care of myself and don’t need cow sellers is kind of gone too and I hate that because it makes me feel like I have nowhere to turn and my own ‘family member’ turned me in to criminals who would, if they could put on on invisible ring and get away with it, have me dead, I just read the analogy if the invisible ring in the Republic again and one of the things the last few weeks have taught me is that, sadly, far too many people would be willing to do wrong if they were able to getxaway with it than I previously realised. I realised how many people, at all sorts of places, seem to be willing to take unethical action that harm might harm or even kill another at the request of a supervisor. I think many would follow a supervisor’s orders even if they knew the harm they were doing might cause death especially if they thought the person deserved it.

They have set me up and hurt me in such a way as to make it extremely unlikely that anyone will believe me if I speak out about it (unless I try very, very hard to tell my side ofvit all as I have been trying to do). I don’t know if anyone at that hospital talked to Sarah but the idea of Sarah thinking that anything that happened at that hospital was okay or that such treatment was appropriate for me scares me and makes me feel powerless. I want her to understand the danger of her words; I don’t think anyone at NFNC got why having and staying in these uncomfortable discussions about justice and oppression was so important to me. I think I got relegated to the periphery of the community and cast as a troublemaker but I was just calling for more space to acknowledge what was crucial to safety.

I still do not know what possessed Sarah to think she had a right to… say any of those things, but to suggest a counselir, in that way, in that context, and then making me fight for a few minutes to talk to her, and… all of it… cannot begin to rant about how damaging it is.

So, in that hospital, there was Dr. Calica, the psychiatrist who I loathe to call such. I saw her once upon intake, possibly one other time though it is blending in my mind with the first, and once briefly later, I think it was the morning before they said my temperature was 96.1 and turned the lights out and walked away. The first time, at the intake, she would take her mask off and on like a strategy for intimidation. It would scarecand confuse me and ummm you can’t get an unbiased evaluation ehen every time the ‘patient’ goes to open their mouth you mess ewith your mask to intimidate them but that is what she did. Her goal was to make me tongue tied and to use subtle strategies to oppress me while appearing within her right to evaluate me.

Holding a stick over me (metaphorically, of course), she would ask me questions like how are you going to support yourself when you get out of here, where are you going to go, et cetera, like, OMG what is going on, I had to have a hotel call the police because I paid $125 to stay there and they tried to ban me from the property while all my stuff was still in the room! Then later that day I go to the hospital and once again it is oppression. I somehow got myself stuck in a place that I really truly had good reason to think was certainly the end of me, this place where medicine is supposedly practiced, that calls itself a hospital, where a psychiatrist, knowing nothing whatsoever about me, demanded to know exactly what my plan was upon release, wherecI would stay, how I would come up with money.

That alone makes me like, grrr, you have no right whatsoever to know those kinds of things about my life and hey I need to be out if this hospital to access resources to even begin to figure out where to go next… I can’t even use the internet here and I have enough money that there are plenty of places I could go and it would be kind of irresponsible of me to make these decisions for you right off the bat without doing resource or talking to people which I can only do when I am *out* of this hospital. And do you expect me to be able to think when you keep pulling down your mask at strategic times to get me flustered?

So she tries to convince me California is not the right place for me and she knows nothing whatsoever about my financial situation of means of livelihood so I have no idea whatsoever under what authority she purports to disseminate housing discrimination in such an arbitrary fashion (or at all for *any* reason) but I should think the State of California would do much better without her.

I want to know though: obviously they were ‘treating’ me (oppressing me) based on some information provided by someone because it certainly was not coming out of any awareness of my medical history from my persoective. I am scared to know who they might have talked to that led them to believe it might be a good idea to treat me like that.

Obviously there was some strategy or ‘treatment plan’ based on something thst had nothing whatsoever to do with anything I told them. I asked the police to tell them I am *autistic* and would communicate best in *writing* but nobody there let me *communicate* in any way at all.

But who, like, is there one person primarily responsible for giving them information that led to this course of ‘treatment’? How did the narrative about me take shape in that hospital, who is most responsible for it, and how did that affevt my treatment which amounted to abusing me by making me think I was going to die? I am suddenly very i terested in hospitals as systems and my questions resolve around these so personally relevant issues.

At first I had my mother on the list of people they could talk to but as soon as they tried to take away my breakfast that first morning with unnecessary gall bladder tests, and it scared me as my mother had her gall bladder out when she was a younger, not because I thought anything was wrong, but because I feared her husband was communicating with the hospital through her, and so I urgently went to the nurses station to cross out her name.

But Sarah, she is the one who could sell me out to them, because if she was sooo quick to jump to cutting iff resources and recommending cow sellers before, certainly after all I had written, if she had read it, she would think something was even more wrong with me than she suspected before camp that year. If they did talk to Sarah, why didn’t they let me out sooner, why couldn’t she make them change their minds, if she was on my side? 🙁 All I can say is that while they kept messing with my diet, even when they put meat on my tray, not once do I recall them giving me *dairy milk*. At every meal, no matter what else they gave me, it seems they always gave me plant-based milk and usually I think tbe first thing I would do is drink that. I don’t know if it means anything but it makes me really want to understand how *some* of all this is connected and find some clarity.

I mean, you might say it was only three days, but… when you can’t eat or drink and are being poisoned and don’t know with what and then they try to scare you into thinking you are going to die… it feels like forever. I’m sure these kinds of abuse tactics happen in psych units all the time, too. I have never seen one nearly as dysfunctional as this one but I am sure these must be some if the oldest tricks in tbe book. How to stop such oppression in places that are supposed to be dedicated to medicine…

After I was told I had this fever, I think, Dr. Calica and some man whose function I do not recall walked into my room together. It was near midnight if I recall. At one point she told me that what I said in Spanish on the other unit about my mother’s husband’s abuse and then bringing up that I have a right to my property was a ‘problem’ but ai think itvwas another time before this.

On this occasion I vaguely remember her saying something about maybe being discharged the next day but with Dr. Calica I wasn’t getting my hopes up. I was pretty sure she was only getting my hopes up to manipulate my emotions. Anyway, I was kind of expecting in this night that I really might not live much longer, and I really hope someone will believe me that it really was that bad. She came to my room and asked again what I was going to do upon discharge and I know she mentioned Sarah’s name for some reason. Maybe at one point I just told her I’d talk to Sarah when I got out and then thecway she said Sarah’s name was so mocking in tone and she was like, if you get in touch with your feiend Sarah, then what? Or something, I don’t know, but it made me worry that maybe Sarah was on *her* side, like there was a hint of it in her voice. She asked about money again and once again I was like, I have money. She said, “Where is it!” I said, “In my wallet.” Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. ‘Where is your money?!?’ What kind of a psychiatrist is this?

Unfortunately I answered, and then she interrogated me about where my *wallet* was. She intinidates you so much and if you don’t find a way to comply who knows how long she can hold you. I was like, I don’t know, I haven’t seen my stuff since I got here (though Doctor I mean Officer Britt made it really clear that it was well within my rights to have access to cash and belongings). I sometimes think of him as Dr. Britt (to the point of accidentally calling him that) because he was the only one who acted anything like it.

The guy she is with says, “it is probably in the safe, then,” and they immediately walk out of my room together, which feels a LOT like how that security officer interrogated me about my car and whispered about it to the other one, in front of me, who then made like he was going to find it and… when my belongings are returned the next day I was actually surprised to find my cash and bank card still there! That night though, I expected to die anyway, and it didn’t much matter that it seemed Dr. Calica was going to steal my wallet too…

My laptop wasn’t there, though. Upon discharge they were so nice to me (the mean ones left me alone and the nice ones were really nice) and I could for the *first time* feel that someone on that staff might have empathy for me. My nurse (for the last day ir so) Kristen was so concerned to help me get on my way safely and with warm clothes and before it got dark and I could *feel* that it mattered to her. I could feel her heart caring. When I said I was missing a laptop she acted concerned in a way that made me feel cared for; we found out the police had left it in the ER? But they brought it up to me…

I have been confused about how when I got back here I somehow knew that I did not have a laptop charger even though I had no memory of losing it anywhere. It did not confuse me till yesterday, I just assumed I didn’t have it, but when I carry my laptop, I usually carry the charger, so I don’t know where it would be, unless they brought me the laptop from the ER but didn’t bring me the charger with it. I have another one but it is in that car! I have been thinking if getting another because though that laptop scared me for a while as far as how it mught ge compromised (as I left it out at that creep’s house and I took it being left in the ER as a sifn: emergency) it would be so much easier to write in there! Also, OMG, last night’s Jimmy Fallon episode was the strangest thing and I kind of wanted to get a laptop charger so I can write about pretty nuch the whole thing from beginning to end.

Anyway, it is miserable, being here, so sick and miserable. I have been lying here trying to read Plato when I haven’t gotten exercise in forever and Plato is talking about medicine and taking care of the body and how imortant exercise is and I feel powerless because I just can’t… or I have no one with me to help me do it safely, to help me heal… I can’t exercise or eat well… it is just ugh and the only thing I can think of is to lie down in a mattress and scream Mariah!!! with my hands reaching up to the sky, like on thst mountain. This seems to have so mych to so with an answer but I don’t know what exactly. I feel so much like the King in All’s Well That Ends Well right now and Mariah has something to do with what I inagine will make me well?

Mariah, I feel so ugh, I haven’t gotten consistent exercise in forever and I am still too afraid of this cracking knee to get on a bicycle. I feel like with you around all this would be so much simpler somehow!!! It is so sad and hard to read Plato talking about health and fitness when you feel like this.

Plato says that the sense of physical fitness fills one with self-confidence and energy and makes you twice the ‘man’ you used to be.

Oh I believe in yesterday…

Love,

Willow